The raunchy history of Wicca

(Previously titled: The way to power is not having sex with your grandma.)

I’ve been Wiccan half my life now. (Wiccan… Wiccen? Can we change this to the feminine now that Wicca is a feminist religion? No? Well maybe I will anyway just for kicks.)

That sounds pretty impressive hey? I’ve been Wiccen half my life now. Yeah, except I’m not very old. Anyway, that’s beside the point. Recently I’ve had the dubious pleasure of re-hashing the history of Wicca and I thought it might be a pleasant diversion to rifle through a summary of that history.

From time to time people come to me asking about the craft and this is the one thing I never touch on. There are two main thought-trails on this:

One: Wicca, synonymous with Witchcraft, came to light through Gerald Gardner. It was an ancient religion passed down in secret from before Christian times and Gardner wanted to bring it into the main stream so that it would not be lost.

Two: Wicca is a modern religion based on many different ancient traditions founded by Gerald Gardner. I generally subscribe to the second camp. While the New Forest Coven might actually have existed there certainly wasn’t one Wicca for all the hidden covens if this was the case.

But the main reason I don’t go into the history is Gardner himself. He might have been very progressive for his time (as his fans will assure you) but he was still a dirty old homophobe who used religion to have sex with young (possibly vulnerable) women, and I’ve had enough experience with dirty old dicks using the Goddess as a hostage for their perversions to last me a few lifetimes.

True story: Gardner made it a law within the coven that when a high priestess reached a certain age she would have to relinquish her position to a younger, more beautiful woman, initiated into the coven through the Great Rite, of course. (For all you non-Wiccens “The Great Rite” is ritual sex.) His teachings also give backbones to such movements as “no kinks in the circle” and the strict polarity within his philosophy is alienating to our trans, intersex and gender queer siblings.

Just as The Catholic Church and the Church of England had their divide, so too did Wicca. British Traditional Wicca (also known as “real Wicca” to a few snobs) has two branches, Gardnerian and Alexandrian. Alex Sanders, the founder of the Alexandrian Tradition, was initiated into Gardner’s coven before the split. Now, if every young Wicce (that’s a female witch) has to have sex with the old High Priest (Pictured on the right, doesn’t that just get your juices going?) who do all the boy witches perform the Great Rite with?

Well maybe it was because of Sanders that Gardner brought in the rule that when the High Priestess was getting older she needed to step down for someone young and beautiful because poor Alex Sanders had to do the Great Rite with his Grandma.

Yeah. Good times, I’m sure.

Somehow from this rough start Wicca gained momentum and became a feminist religion. We can attribute much of this to High Priestess Doreen Valiente’s work, without whom Gardner would have been lost, but beyond that we have to ask ourselves how important is the history of the Wiccan movement anyway? Why does it matter if people have been practicing in secret for hundreds of years or if people have simply created a new, peaceful, loving, earth-honouring religion which works for them?

To me the history of Wicca, particularly British Traditional Wicca, is little more than a funny story. What matters is the future; our roles as custodians of the earth, and the present; our dedication to spreading the Goddess’s law “Love unto all beings.”

I appreciate that Gerald stepped up and began the process that decriminalised witchcraft but at the same time I feel that if he didn’t the time would have come where someone else would have taken up that mantle. The Goddess needs us now more than ever. She’d have called forth her children with or without the help of creepy old Gerald Gardner.

My upcoming novel Blessed Prey touches on this subject and how harmful it can be to our community, so stay tuned for that, and more importantly: stay safe!

Blessed be xx